


in hopeless devotion

by CatharsisFire



Category: Cyberpunk 2077 (Video Game)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, F/M, no beta we die like men
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-03
Updated: 2021-01-16
Packaged: 2021-03-13 04:35:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 8,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28522533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CatharsisFire/pseuds/CatharsisFire
Summary: A series of Female!V x Johnny Silverhand one-shots
Relationships: Johnny Silverhand/Female V, Johnny Silverhand/V
Comments: 12
Kudos: 92





	1. black dog (t.)

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: i saw a post on tumblr about Johnny finding out V lost her virginity to a SAMURAI song and thought it was kinda funny tbh but im also a glutton for pain so i couldn’t not have angst >_<
> 
> Warnings: sexual implications, angst, violence, mentions of blood, blasphemy, murder

He heard it before he felt anything, before he saw anything. His own music flowing clearly through his ears and he took a look around the room just to double check that V was still in her spot asleep on the bed and that she wasn’t trying to play some kind of stupid fucking joke on him. But there she was, in bed, still in the same spot she fell asleep in hours ago.

And he hears it again, the familiar guitar riff, and a memory of V’s creeped into his mind then, slinking around the corners before slamming into him.

_It burns, her mouth is on fire, her lip busted open and swollen and there's the copper tang of blood in her mouth. Her jaw hurts and the pain on her cheekbone throbs uncontrollably as she wanders through the streets of Night City. V glances down at her hands where the knuckles are broken open and bleeding and for a moment she forgets how cold she is as her adrenaline picks up once again and she laughs heartily before taking off running on the high of it. Her footsteps hit the ground hard and fast and her thin jacket catches the wind within the fabric blowing it behind her from the speed. She runs until she reaches the elevator of an old, tattered building on the outskirts of Watson. The ride up is slow and her heart is thrummimg rapidly in her chest, hands twitching and wringing with anticipation and ache._

_V knows she shouldn’t seek him out, not after the scene his mother made last time she caught them together. Not after her proclamation that V’s young stupidity would get her son killed one day. She was a curse. A plague that entered her household without warning. But V chalked it up to her reputation as a troublemaker and her tendency to show up in the late hours of the night busted and beaten up in need of medical attention._

_V called him Sonny, something not even relatively close to his given name, and when he asked her about it she told him it was because he was bright and blinding and warm like the Sun. His hands were always gentle and caring as they cleaned her wounds, his fingers always lingering a second too long on her busted lips, his grip a little too commanding when he gripped her chin to assess the damage of her face, his eyes too soft when they gazed over her, burned over her. And every time they wound back up in the position, she’d close her eyes so that she didn’t have to stare into the burning sun that was his being._

_She’s sitting on the rigid sink as he passes over her wounds, standing between the space of her thighs, chiding her for not being careful, never being careful. Telling her to stop picking fights with those bigger than her, and even if she had won this one, she’ll not be so lucky every time. And V lets him scold her, humming whenever he makes a point that she already knows to be true, because it’s entirely too hard to tell him that sometimes she picks those fights so that she has a reason to see him, that it’s easier to spend this time with him patching her up than it is to ask for his time outside of her pain and negligence. So she takes what she can get, even if the parts of it are soaked in her childish, remissive nature, and his light agitation._

_By the time her face is cleaned of blood and debris and Sonny’s given her something to accelerate her healing, she’s laid across his bed while he sits in a chair across the room strumming easily on the guitar. There’s a record turning somewhere in the room near him and he’s trying to keep up with it to match the tempo, and she swears she’s heard the song a few times before in the numerous visits she’s made over here but the name slips from her thoughts and she only remembers it’s by some band called SAMURAI._

_She watches him with a fervor in her eyes, there’s something about the way his hands glide over the neck of the guitar, holding it so gently like he’s scared he could break it, that reminds her of how he held her moments ago. And she teases him for his obsession with the band and asks him if he wants to be a rockstar too, if he’ll remember her if he does. His gaze rips over to her and she almost forgets what breathing feels like when the air locks itself in her lungs because the look in his eyes has set her alight from the inside out. He says something, V knows he says something but the blood is rushing through her ears so loudly that she doesn’t hear it, she doesn’t compute or comprehend what he retorts back and there’s a breath of time, a second of bold stupidity passes and she sets herself on the course before she can convince herself to back out. Her own confidence startles her slightly when she looks over at him and tells him, “Then get over here and fuck me like you’re famous, Rockstar.” It happens too quickly for her to process his movements after that, because one second he was lounged in the chair, guitar lightly gripped in his hands and the next he’s thrown it aside onto the floor somewhere and he’s kneeling over her on his bed. There’s a fleeting moment where his shirt is thrown away off his body and his hand finds her neck in a gentle grasp, taunting her, stating that she shouldn’t say such things if she doesn’t mean them._

It takes a second for Johnny to register what he’s seen and only two more to realize that V lost her virginity to his song. He wants to laugh and howl at how hilarious that is and he recognizes the weight of the dirt he has on her now and he can’t wait for her to wake up and watch her face flush in anger and embarrassment when he tells her he knows about this. 

Yet a part of him wants to fish through her memories and see what happened to the kid in them, his sudden curiosity too much as he closes his eyes and concentrates on picking through her brain, in search of his answer, something that is so much easier when she isn’t awake and making the effort to block him from certain parts of her. At this point it doesn’t feel like invading her privacy to him, because he’s already entangled within her circuitry as she is with him, and hell she could dip into all his memories too with some time and some persistence, so it seems only fair. 

_The wind is whipping her hair around, matting it the tears on her cheeks; it’s frigid and harsh, just like how she feels, in this moment. She looks out over Night City from the skyscraper she stands atop and is pulled away from the view by the rustling of the man next to her on the ground. Her knuckles hurt again, cracked open from the force of her hands hitting bones and concrete but now there’s no one to run home to, to fix them. No one to run to for bandages and stitches and her heart feels vacant and cold again. Betrayal sinks into her bones and mixes with the hatred that resides in them._

_V turns her head slowly towards the ground and she glances at the man there, sees his blood pooling onto the concrete below him and feels a rise of anger when he pleads for God to save him from this monster._

_“Don’t,” she snaps suddenly, hands flying to her temples and gripping at the hair there, “don’t look up and beg for God, He can’t save you from me. God left this city to the heathens, so now you answer to me not Him.”_

_He’s shaking from the force of his tears and begs for mercy as she continues, “There’s no mercy in Night City. You said so yourself, Sonny, the strong are awarded less suffering but no one ever gets mercy.” She spits the words at him, venomous and spiteful. V reaches behind her and grabs the gun that’s tucked into the back of her jeans and drags it from the spot where it’s dug into the skin there. Her left hand grips onto the slide and pulls back, chambering the only round, before shoving it into his forehead. “You never cared for anyone else, Sonny, just saw me as a stupid fucking kid to use and it’s my fault for being naive. That won’t happen again.” V’s crying again and her words sound defeated and hollow from pain, new tear tracks run down her face, heavy and violent, and her hand shakes and she squeezes the trigger before a second thought can pass through her head._

_It’s suffocating, the knowledge of what she’s done and a scream rips from her throat, coarse and scared as she begins to process the events that have unfolded. It’s growing dark in her vision and she wants to pass out from the weight in her chest and in her mind. But the gun clattering to the ground drags her out of her thoughts and she picks it up again to think of her next plan._

_She turns her back on Night City and the body on the ground and thinks of her escape to Atlanta._

Johnny’s snatched away from the memory he’d found and he looks across the room to see V awake, sitting up on the edge of the bed with her legs hanging over the side on the floor with her head in her hands, elbows braced on her knees. She looks small like this, defeated, and he registers the presence of her whirlwind of emotions entwining with his and there’s a pang of guilt in the deep recesses of his mind. Or is it her’s?

“Do you enjoy hurting me, Johnny? Or is it just that you can’t help it?” She’s tired, her voice exacerbated by the gruffness of sleep lingering in it.

_And it’s V for Vengeance._


	2. as it was (t.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: spoilers, mentions of suicide, blood, light violence, self deprication, a single semi-dirty joke

He had spent his newfound time tangled within her memories and thoughts, each one falling apart and presenting themselves to him slowly; connecting nonexistent pieces to an edgeless puzzle. As she was with him, constantly haunted by memories and the presence of a stranger always just out of arm's reach. Her recent memories were always the strongest, Johnny had watched her die twelve times over as soon as the Relic kickstarted, her proclamation of “I’ll fucking kill you” to Dex on a loop as she lay unconcious at the ripperdocs, a slideshow made for only him to see. He realized by the time she had awoken that his own death was the first thing she was greeted with as well, a cursed movie shared between the two dumbasses of the hour. 

Johnny wished she’d have never woken up that day because when she did her emotions were almost too much for him to even fathom, they choked him and clouded his mind, a constant torment of guilt and grief and hopelessness. Her fear of dying seeped into bones he no longer had and he wanted her dead, wanted to finish his business with Arasaka and be done with her. But as she was wheeled into her apartment by the one with _the hair_ all that she felt was guilt and his head spun with nausea that he knew wasn’t his and he felt the dread of failure seep so deep into his skin that it almost felt like his own. He wanted her dead for a new reason then. Her hopelessness stifled his being and though he was already dead, a small voice at the back of his mind wished for death again. Hers. Not his. Never his. And so he told her to put iron in her mouth and pull the trigger. And for all her faults and all her bitterness for life, she proclaimed that she’d kill him instead while she downed the pills from the ripperdoc.

So maybe she wasn’t _so_ bad. 

They were entwined in the most intimate ways in her neural pathways. Their neural pathways, now. And yet they still were as close as strangers in the beginning. Every response between the two of them was cold and brash and sarcastic and he expected nothing less from the woman that referred to him as a parasite and a talking brain tumor. Just like she expected nothing more from the man that told her to kill herself and then proceeded to beat her face into the glass of her apartment window when they first met. But he stares at her more softly now and she doesn’t snap back at him as often, her words are more tender now, like a soft caress across his face. Her walls have fallen considerably and she doesn’t take the pills from the ripperdoc as often now, only before she goes to sleep, to block out some of the noise, or so she says. 

He feels, physically, everything that she does and the delay of it is anything if not truly inconvenient. Emotionally he knows something is wrong before he does physically, the change of hormones and the induction of anger spikes him to glitch into her presence. Johnny catches her standing in her open bathroom in front of the mirror, cigarette between her lips, an open bottle of alcohol in one hand and her bloodied white shirt in the other. V is looking down assessing the open wound on her stomach before grimacing, spitting the cigarette into the sink and shoving the shirt up to her mouth to replace it, biting down hard on it. Within a second she’s pouring the alcohol straight onto the wound and screaming. 

The wound has to be cleaned before she can take the healing enhancements, so she dumps more alcohol down onto her stomach, and tears trickle down from the corners of her eyes. She loses her balance from the pain, ready to collapse onto the tile beneath her but hands grip harshly onto her elbows from behind and pull her back until she’s leaned against the firmness of a chest. 

“If you don’t stop this you’re gonna get us fuckin’ killed.” Johnny’s voice vibrates heavily into her back and rattles her heart as it passes through her being. He releases one of her elbows to grab the alcohol from her hand and sets it down onto the limited counter space before them. V sniffles against him, _fucking fragile and stupid_ , she chants in her head, and she wants to beat her skull into the mirror in front of her until this feeling goes away.

It’s back again. The hopelessness of dying. The guilt of Jackie’s death and T-Bug’s and everyone else’s that has ever been graced with her unfortunate, unlucky fucking prescence. And she doesn’t wanna cry but she can’t help it anymore, because the more she stands in this small bathroom in pain from a stab wound, the more she feels like a fuck-up. A Grade-A fucking, fuck-up. 

“I’m so stupid, I could probably fuck up a wet dream, huh?” It’s a watery laugh and the jab is entirely directed at herself and her failures, because if she doesn’t laugh she’ll keep crying and she’s already tired of her eyes burning with tears.

Johnny chuckles lightly behind her, still holding her upright and the feeling sets her nerves alight and her cheeks heat from more than pain now.

“You have.” The answer is blunt, short and simple and V is wondering just how much he’s seen of her mind and just how much he knows about her. Her brow knits as she tries to find the meaning behind his proclamation and how he’s so sure of it or if he’s just joking with her. So much so that she doesn’t notice that he’s leaned forward and grabbed the healing agent until Johnny has his hand at her mouth with the pills telling her to ‘open’. V does, without much of a second thought and she lets him maneuver her to the bed until she’s laid flat on her back. 

“You gotta stop that.” Johnny chides.

“Stop what? Being charming enough to quite literally get my guts rearranged,” V simpers out a laugh, her hand quickly reaching to grab at her stomach from the pain, “okay, I see your point.”

“You’re gonna run us into the ground before we have the chance to get anything accomplished.”

“Look Johnny, I don’t mean to brag or anything but I’ve cheated death once already, twice actually if we count that business with NetWatch.” V stops talking for a split second, contemplating, before beginning again. “I think I’d have to try a bit harder than a bar fight stab wound, if I were gonna die again.”

A hushed silence falls between the two of them, as V feels the beginnings of the drugs take effect, stitching the fibers of her body back together from the inside out. Her predicament draws her mind back to Jackie, to the fall from Arasaka and the ride in the Delamain. She remembers the urgency in her voice when she told him to jump, the pain that flew through her body as she hit glass and steel and metal beams. The burn of blood rolling down into her eye and the pitiful and miserable feeling of looking over at Jackie in the elevator on the way down to the garage knowing he wasn’t going to make it out of the heist alive. She remembers the warmth of his blood when he held her face, slotting the Relic into her head in the back of the cab and the helpless way she told him that they made it, that they would be legends in Night City, even though she could tell he was slipping away. And the way he told her that _she_ would be the legend, not them.

“Knew he was dying, just didn’t want to accept it.” V knew she didn’t have to say it out loud, but it made her feel less alone to speak to Johnny in the void of her room.

“Ever wish it was him that kept the biochip?” V knows it is an honest question, even she’d thought about it from time to time, him keeping the biochip and her keeping her best friend just a little while longer. 

“No. Never.” She shakes her head gently, almost unnoticeably. “Wouldn’t wish this on anyone.” She knows it would be selfish to wish Jackie had kept it, that it would make this pain his, this problem his, and he was too good for something this awful.

“Being with me just that awful?” Johnny teases. V takes a moment to think, dwelling on the question.

V supposes it’s fate that led her and Silverhand together, because she can’t possibly believe it’s anything else. If it’s divine punishment or karma or just stupid coincidence, then it doesn’t matter because it all feels like fate to her. And she wants to ask Johnny if he believes in fate, that everyone and everything is connected somehow, someway, entangled within each other in some shape or another. If he believes that all roads do lead to Rome. But she shys away from the thought and buries it back in her mind.

“No. It’s just,” and she stops unaware of how to finish her thought, because it feels wrong to say that this is her burden to carry, and even more wrong of her to admit that if anyone should suffer it should be her. Because she is aware of what landed her here in the first place. This is her punishment for being too cocky about a suicide run into Arasaka. Everything felt too easy and she felt too comfortable with the mission and the details that she let her guard down for a split second, too wrapped up in the thought of a positive outcome that she never checked her intuition, never stopped to think that it could end badly until it did. 

Jackie had always been the better of the two, always loved by everyone, and his circle was wide and tight-knit, unlike V’s. All she had was Jackie. So it’s easy to grit her teeth and bear this because she does it alone. If it had been Jackie, it’d be his mother too, and Misty, and everyone who loved him, but with V, it’s just V. No mother to worry for her, no lover to leave behind, no tight inner circle to sit and watch her fall apart in her own body. It’s her burden to suffer this; to live and die like this. 

Yet there’s a buried thought in the recesses of her mind, that she doesn’t want to admit to. That she wouldn’t want this to be anyone else, because she enjoys Johnny’s company. Enjoys his snarky comments and his brash nature and the tender moments they’ve shared.

Johnny watches as her face twists in contemplation and listens in on her thoughts, taking in the way in which she speaks to herself and about herself, How she compares the value of her own life against that of her friends, and he forgets for a second that she’s only 27. That she’s still young in so many ways and that it’s him that’s tearing her life apart. That it’s _him_ , the burden that she’s forced to carry. And he blames himself.

“I can hear you, you know.” It’s a simple statement from Johnny, but V’s face heats at the thought that he hears her thoughts, that he heard what she said about him and Jackie and herself. That someone is always within grasp of invading the privacy of her mind whenever they want. And she feels the need to put some distance between them, because it all feels too vulnerable right now, and in the morning she’ll chalk it up to the meds she took to heal her stab wound but for now she knows it’s because he heard her think about how much she cares for his company. So she slowly rises from her spot on the bed and says that she needs to shower the blood off herself before she makes a bigger mess of the sheets there and she disappears into the bathroom, before Johnny can acknowledge what she’s said.

By the time Johnny can fizzle back into her existence it’s late the next morning, _she must’ve taken the pills last night,_ it’s a fleeting thought that’s interrupted by a humming he’s never heard. He glitches by the closet, leaning against the wall there, to catch a glimpse of V slouched in the computer chair with her legs resting up on the desk, moving slightly at the waist to twist the chair back and forth. She's got a burrito in her left hand and the right holds the computer mouse while she searches through her email. She must feel his presence, feel his stare on her skin, because she twists her head over to look at him, beaming gently at him.

“Good morning, Johnny.”

_And it’s V for Vulnerability._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the first thing I've written for fun in a while so feedback is welcome!!!!


	3. a venust smother (m.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: spoilers, mentions of dying, depressive undertones, mentions of survivors guilt, angst, but also smut, sad, soft smut but smut nonetheless
> 
> A/N: i listened to smother by daughter on repeat while i wrote this whole thing, give it a listen if you’re interested XD also this is the first smut ive ever written so feedback is very welcome!!!!

She lays in bed again staring up at the ceiling, the noise of Night City drifting in through the slightly open window beside her. V knows he’s tired of her. Tired of her torrent of emotions. Tired of her dwelling mind that always seems akin to the darkness left in the little soul she feels she has left. She realizes this is probably hard for him, like it’s hard for her; dying and coming back; sharing a being with another; the weight of a life on your shoulders. She calls out to him in the darkness of the room, a small echo of his name, bleeding into the air there; and it’s so faint and meek that V almost doesn’t hear it herself, but he glitches into her peripheral onto the couch across the room from her bed. 

His presence is her only constant, always lingering in the forefront of her mind and his name is always on the tip of her tongue whenever danger arises. The same name she calls out to every time the Relic sends shockwaves and seizures through her body and she’s sure she’s going to die. “Johnny.” Hopeless and helpless she calls to him, time and time again. And every time he answers.

V doesn’t know what to say now that he’s here, so overwhelmed with emotions she can’t place and there’s a lingering thought that they’re not all hers anyways. Or that they at least belonged to her at one point before now. Tears slip from the corners of her eyes and down her temples to find a new home within her hair. She musters some buried courage to turn her head over to glance at Johnny. V takes a long look at him through the blur of gathered tears and sniffles.

“I'm sorry.” It’s tender and wobbly. V takes a deep shaky breath before she continues on with the feeling that drains her, “I know you hate this and that you probably wish you were with anyone other than me. I’m sorry that you’re stuck with me and the fucking mess I’ve made.”

Johnny feels it, the same pain in his chest that echoed in hers when they first met. The same one that still spins in her’s on nights like these. The guilt of survival and inconvenience.

“Don't have to apologize to me.” He says it so gruffly that it seems like he’s blowing her off, pushing the apology under the rug to forget about it, but V can feel the change in the stirring emotion of her head. He cares for her. Always has.

“I know, but I want to.”

Johnny can feel the weight of what happened to Evelyn pressing heavily against V’s conscience, and the lingering jab from Rogue was truly no help either. She was aware of the bodies left behind her on the job she’d taken and hated to be reminded of them, so she’d snapped at her, bringing the death of Johnny into the conversation when she knew she shouldn’t have. 

“In the darkness of my second death I’d like to meet my creator,” she begins slowly, lowly, eyes cast over him and then across the room, “and I’ll ask if it was ever me that was the unlucky one, or if it was everyone else that was unlucky ‘cause they had the displeasure of ever being acquainted with me.”

V is smothered by emotions she doesn’t feel like she understands anymore, all her thoughts have become the strongest and strangest amalgamation of her own and Johnny’s; and she can’t pull apart who she is at this point; who she wants to be; who she will be. It feels like the weight of worlds is braced against the interior bones of her skull and the pressure of it is too much already and yet it still feels ready to crack until it bleeds into the open air, even without her acknowledgement or permission. So she sits up in the bed, hands flying to brace against her temples. She’s ready to see the Relic Malfunction flash through her vision and for the pain to wrack through her body, but it never comes. V cries out in frustration, she’s tired of this, of the pain and the deterioration of her own body and the constant feeling of her slipping control. Tired of feeling like a prisoner in her own body, while something eats at her like a fucking parasite.

V turns in the bed until her legs hang off the side and her elbows press into her knees, as her hands still hold onto her temples. She counts her breaths now, to calm her sobs, in and out, until they become as even as clockwork. Until it’s just tears and not her body's own visceral reaction. She wants to feel something other than the dichotomy of worlds inside her right now and this thought winds around the edges of her consciousness until it tangles with Johnny’s. 

Johnny glitches in front of her now, kneeling down before her and grabbing her wrists in a gentle motion. He pulls her arms apart, removing her hands from her head, beckoning her to lift her head and look at him. V does, a second later, she sniffles and does her best to wipe her tears onto her shoulders, because Johnny’s still got her wrists in his grasp. She tests the waters and slowly moves her hands to grab a hold of the sunglasses on his face, slipping them off in a tender movement. They stay like that for a second, before Johnny lets her wrists go, stands, and gestures her to lay back onto the bed again.

“Come on Samurai, you know what to do.”

Heat gathers on her cheeks and spreads down her neck as she lays back, her gaze following his movements as he rests his knees on the bed between her legs. V reaches up to grab at his shirt and remove it but he mindlessly swats them away, muttering to her how this isn’t about him. Instead he focuses on undressing her, pulling clothing away piece by piece, until she’s bare beneath him.

Johnny’s hands run up and down her thighs slowly, barely touching the skin there and he stares down at her taking in the view of her figure.

“Tell me what you want.” He tells her gruffly. And she wants to answer, she truly does, but she hasn’t an inkling on what to ask for, wracks her brain for an answer, but still comes up empty. V lightly shakes her head, chanting over and over in her mind that _she doesn’t know what she wants._ Truthfully she’s willing to take whatever he is willing to give her, anything to distract her mind and derail her thoughts. He knows this, hears her inner turmoil and watches the way her brow knits in light frustration. He begins again as he starts to lean over her form. “So I’ll choose for you then.” It’s teasing and chiding the way he says it and V wants to flay the skin from her body because he shouldn’t be able to make her feel this way, shouldn’t make her skin feel like it’s half a second away from melting off her body. It’s not fair. 

His right hand continues his trail up and down her thigh, back and forth, as the left stays put holding her legs apart, tenderly gripping at her thigh. And when his right hand finds the apex between her thighs, her reaction visceral when his fingers delve in. Her back arches off the bed and her breath hitches in her throat, releasing as a broken moan. Static fizzles behind her closed eyes and her trembling hands reach for anything they can grasp. Anchor onto as she falls apart. The sheets, his shirt, his hair, _his wrist between her thighs._

She wants to cry out, curse the world for all it’s worth, as she quakes beneath him, because he’s ruined her. Ruined her for the rest of time. Nothing for the rest of her life will ever match the feeling of his hands between her thighs, will never match the way he’s gazing down onto her, smirking like he knows he’s that damn good. 

Then suddenly it’s all too much and her nails dig into the skin of his wrist while her other hand reaches to grab at his neck to pull him down to catch his mouth with hers. She shivers against and pleads against his mouth for a release he lets her have.

Through the hum of her release, V hears the _clink_ of a belt followed by the sound of a zipper. She peers up at Johnny through tear coated lashes, as she hooks her thighs tightly around his waist bringing him so much closer. She’s stifled by the fullness she feels when he enters her and her head falls back at the feeling. V feels metal on the base of her skull, finger grasping at the hair there, her head is pulled back ever more, slowly as Johnny’s grip tightens and his lips follow the curve of her throat while her head tilts away. 

It’s all too much, the pressure, the feeling of him, the entanglement of their emotions swirling inside her mind and she cries out to him, murmuring praises and begging him for something she can’t place yet. There is a hope in her, simmering beneath the surface of pleasure, from feeling wanted, from seeing herself how Johnny see’s her, and she wants to combust from it all. The feeling in her stomach is spreading warmth throughout her body and static is catching all over her body.

Johnny’s right hand leaves its place on V’s thigh, fingerprints singed into the skin there, to the sheets by her head so that he can tower over her, look down and gaze at her. He grasps her hair tighter, forcing her to look up at him. And she meets his eyes with a weak, watery smile, her pupils blown from pleasure and stimulation, and her mouth falls open with a call of his name, _Johnny. Johnny. Johnny._

Her nails dig desperately into the skin of his back, trying to force him back to her, so that she can feel his skin on hers as he moves inside her. He follows her grasp down, laying against her and resting his forehead against hers.

“Let go, Samurai.” So she does, in a frazzle of cries and tears and sobs of his name. In desperate grabs and scratches and sloppy kisses.

When it’s over they’re a tangle of limbs, woven tightly in the safety and comfort of the sheets and Johnny’s metal fingers pass up and down her spine slowly, tracing small, inconsistent patterns there, until her breathing calms, the remors leave her body and her tear tracks dry on her cheeks. 

“Do not be afraid; our fate cannot be taken from us; it is a gift.” It’s stated in a hushed, watery whisper, lowly, so that Johnny knows it’s for him. Tranquil words wrapped between the two of them. 

“Here I was thinkin’ you didn’t read books.”

_And it’s V for Venust._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: The end is a quote from ‘The Inferno’ by Dante. Throughout the game Johnny makes a lot of statements that nod to the fact that he is incredibly well read and he even asks V if they’ve even read a book before, and I thought it could be a nice addition to an otherwise kind of upsetting fic.


	4. warm shadow (t.)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There’s just something about his hands. And her hands.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: I just think about hands too often tbh also Johnny should’ve caught V before they ate shit on the fucking concrete at the hotel for the billionth time and i mean that  
> Warnings: spoilers, sexual implications

V watches him as his hands twist together in front of him, grappling amongst each other like he’s bargaining with something in his mind. The silver catches the light from the Pacifica sun and refracts the glare into her eyes, blinding her as she stares up at him in reverence. Her body aches and her head pounds with a tenuous, dull hurt and the last thing she truly remembers is the floor caving in from underneath her and the shock of falling starkly onto rigid, broken pieces of concrete.  _ So how did I make it to Pacifica?  _

She wants to get up, to reach for Johnny and stabilize her movements, but her body protests when she twists over to roll onto her knees and her breath stalls when the warmth of a tightening grip catches her by her left bicep, and the steel, coldness of a metal hand grasps onto her hand. V uses the bracing of Johnny’s hands to hold her weight as her right hand grips onto the concrete balcony to lift herself up. His hand lingers, one, two, three seconds too long against the back of her arm and heat rises in her cheeks and she turns to look to the ocean, squinting when the sun’s reflection on the water burns her eyes, ignoring the sputtering of her heart. 

Johnny says something about wanting to show her something and before she can agree he’s turning away and walking down the breezeway. V gets a solid few steps in before the dizziness takes over and the ground is rushing up to meet her, but she never hits it. The feeling of rigid metal around her abdomen stills her and the frigid grip of it bleeds into her core. The moment is short-lived, and before V can even appreciate the feeling of Johnny pressed against her back, he’s glitched ahead of her and she’s left holding onto the wall to keep her balance. She huffs, and she’ll tell him later that her annoyance came from not being able to stand upright without help and it had nothing to do with him leaving after the way he gripped onto her and held her. 

V swears it started off as nothing more than morbid interest in his silver hand and that it had nothing to do with the way his hands twists in her hair, or the way they’ve gripped onto her neck, and it definitely had not one single thing to do with the way they've bruised her thighs. Not at all. And it was for sure not because of the way he spins his handgun around his fucking finger. Never. Never. Never.

Johnny tells her to come through the window and V opens her mouth to protest because ‘ _ what the fuck do you mean come through the window’  _ and she grumbles when he tells her to hurry. In hindsight, there could’ve been a swifter way for her to get through the window, but going in sideways and falling clean on her back got the job done just fine. The fact that the wind knocked from her lungs on impact is a small casualty for her stupidity and lack of forethought. 

She makes her way down to the spot Johnny told her about and cracked it open, pulling the dog tags out, before twisting to lean against the cabinetry. Johnny’s already staring down at her from the chair he’s sitting in and she doesn’t have the strength to pick his mind apart to figure out why he hasn’t spoken yet.

It’s a hazy fuzz, the tension in the room, but she doesn’t hesitate to say she’d take a bullet for him and that she’d kill Smasher without a second thought and for a split second Johnny’s glad that he’s wearing his sunglasses right now because he’d be a fucking goner if V could see the look of veneration in his eyes. And he’s entirely sure she’ll keep her word as she slips the tags over her head, because she’s one of the most truehearted and unwavering people he’s ever met. That he’s ever had the pleasure of knowing. 

It’s a tender moment, before V leaves the room, walking down to the stairway, when Johnny fizzles into her line of sight.

“Hotel Pistis Sophia, that right?”

“Mhmm. Good place to die.”

“Just not today.”

“‘Atta girl.” 

And that’s the last straw in her mind and V knows she’s a goner, she’s never going to recover from the presence of Johnny Silverhand. “Oh, please fuck me.” She rebuttles breathlessly, watching her tangible descent. 

It’s easy now for her to recall the reasons she stares at him so intently, but she keeps them buried deep within confines so heavy, that his plundering mind will never discover her intentions or how she falls victim to his many allures.

There’s something that stirs within her in moments of remembrance when she’s shooed Johnny out of her mind to quiet the noise of the ticking time bomb in her brain. Of shared tender moments of her hands grasping and twisting into his while they are an entanglement of limbs and overgrown passion. 

And they are always there, his hands, a warm shadow lingering amidst her mind. Not that she’d care to say it.

Because to admit to herself that she truly cares for his presence, is one step away from telling him that she may love him, and she’ll take her chances between his grasping hands and her buried feelings, because to speak those forbidden words into the air could be cataclysmically bad.

_ And it’s V for Velleity. _

**Bonus Scene:**

There are other times, like now, when he catches her thumbing at the dog tags he’d given her, her fingers running delicately across the engrained metal and twisting them within the gaps between her fingers, absentmindedly. Her thoughts are guarded from him, keeping him out, and with the way her eyes are closed and the way she suddenly grips the tags he’d mistake her for praying, had he not known her better.

He cocks an eyebrow at her in silent question when she pulls herself away from her thoughts and looks to him, and V just shakes her head, an inner plea to get him to drop it before she’s telling him it’s nothing to worry about, that she was just thinking. She motions for him to come to her, a gesture to ensure him that his company was still welcome, and he catches sight of the blood dried in her palm, and the pieces are connecting; her head is locked in the past somewhere but her hands are tracing broken lines in the future.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the first thing I've written for fun in a while so feedback is welcome!!!!


	5. isn't there somewhere (e.)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The guilt of a man hopelessly devoted to you.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: this is super short >_< but i started to think about how Johnny probably feels really guilty about his predicament with V (especially near the end) so i wrote this very small blurb as a sort of thought process he may have.  
> Warnings: none

He had seen it, the longer he was there, the more time she spent with him, he watched the life drain from her eyes. Her once tilted smile was nothing more than a hollow structure before his own eyes, while her own were always glinted with unfallen tears. He was killing her, he knew it. Being with him, here, was destroying her in the worst ways. His presence tainted her soul and he watched the life he let her have with him ruin her to her core. He blames his selfish nature, for not telling her no sooner, for never telling her that she’d be happier if she learned to unlove him, let him go, and never thought of him again. But at the time he felt that to live a life without her, was one unworthy of living. However, as he sees her wander Night City and the days pass he knows that  _ he  _ has made  _ her _ life the one unworthy of living.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the first thing I've written for fun in a while so feedback is welcome!!!!


	6. beautiful bones like fallen stars (t.)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The admiration of a man hopelessly devoted to you.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: I like to think Johnny is a soft lover. Like he’s really hard on the outside but is an incredibly tender enigma on the inside. A true Mr. Darcy if you will. 
> 
> Warnings: light spoilers, sexual implication (not much)

There are instances when Johnny thinks back on his time with V, sincere moments while she lies sleeping across the room, unaware of his thoughts and feelings, when he remembers the innate, intricate details of her. He’s rational in his thoughts when she’s awake because everything he says and feels is within arms length of her, and even closer if he lets his walls down. But when she’s asleep he’s allowed to let his thoughts run rampant with the echo of her.

She is an entirely better person than him, even when he includes the flaws of hers, she is still a Saint in the eyes of a sinner. Because even though the blood on her mercenary hands is thick, they pale in comparison to the carnage wreaked by his. 

Johnny is aware that he is the root of many of her problems, that he is the driving force to an inevitable downfall. But she’s keen to ride this disaster until the end and he is yet to tell her how truly thankful he is for that. But when she calls out to him, guileless and trusting, he feels the guilt of his past wash over him again, because he is undeserving of such when all he has wrought is destruction and distrust. And though he is yet to mention it, he fears the day that she becomes like him, when his engram begins to destroy the parts of her that make her so much more than him, so much better than him. But until then he has her as she is now, as just V.

Although, he’s sure he’d still see her as just V,  _ his _ V. The same V that was stupid enough to steal from Arasaka, and stupid enough to mouth off to Rogue when they first met, and stupid enough to go shot for shot in the ring with someone big enough to crush her fucking skull in their hands. His V, that went to any lengths necessary to show him that he was redeemable and worthy of love and deliverance. His V, that sat with him at his gravesite and salved his wounds of inadequacy and joked that at least they put his body somewhere better than hers. Though that last part did burn his heart in the worst ways. 

His V, cocky and stupid and full of unbridled passion. 

And he doesn’t mind much that he’s rubbed off on her. The pieces of them that have mingled and fused together in their time. Mannerisms and teasing and the way she holds her gun differently now.

_ Johnny watches her, gaze lingering over the rim of his glasses as she hacks into the computer before her. V’s hands fly freely, expertly, across the keyboard and her brow knits in concentration while her teeth catch the edge of her lip.  _

_ “C’mon, baby don’t be mean,” she chides, “give me what I want.” Rationally, Johnny knows she’s talking to the monitor in front of her, but he’s never been much of a rational fucking man and he’s reminded of those same hands and those same words in separate scenarios, when there’s something so familiar about them, and something so painfully soft yet disastrously devious brews in the forefront of his mind as he watches her. But when he’s just on the cusp of opening his mouth to tell her about them, V tilts her head back in victory and breathes out a soft, triumphant ‘yes’ and those same hands come down on the table hard as she stands and grabs her gun from the table, twisting it around her finger in an action that Johnny knew vividly and intimately well. And V throws a sly wink in his direction before cocking her head towards the door and telling him, “let’s go before security’s backup gets here.”  _

His V, who is sure to keep the promised words to him, because she’s never once annulled a promise. And he'd take everything back if he knew the extent of what he was asking. If he knew it would lead them both to their grave. But then again, he’s had a habit of underestimating her in the past, so he has faith that she’ll make it out of this life alive, even with the odds staked so heavily against her.

_ He feels the hazy fuzz of the tension surrounding them and the stale smell of the hotel room permeates the air. Everything in the room looks as starkly the same to him now as it did decades, and the only true difference is the signs of time and dust painted on everything. Her concentration is unbreaking in this moment and her eyes are shining up at him with true hearted promise and determination. And his chest is full of blossomed heat and pin needles and there’s a breath of a moment where he questions if it’s just admiration he’s feeling or if that’s the untraceable feeling of love. But he shakes it from his thoughts as soon as it surfaces because he’s been wrong before and he’ll be wrong again. He’ll chalk it up to being jaded by her proclamation to enact revenge on Smasher without a second thought or that she said she’d take a bullet for him without any bit of hesitation. Or you know what maybe that he’s just a fucking sucker for her, because he’s never one to admit love. _

But Johnny is sure he would shun the light forever if it meant he could continue to gaze at her through the sacrifice of his decisions. Because even through the darkness, he would know her, so vividly and earnestly, that he’s convinced that even in another life he would remember her as well. Would  _ know  _ her as he does now. He knows that even if he’d never been able to see again, he’d know her by the gentle drag of her fingertips, by the tender grasps of her hands around his wrist, by the deep breaths of her laughs, and the shallow hitch of her breath when she’s caught off guard by him. Because her soul is one without comparison, one he could point out even in the depths of the worlds devilry. He knows her like he knows himself, and in fleeting moments like these he feels like he may know her more, the trapped intimate parts of her that are tucked away from others, are his for safe keeping. And he looks at her, now, as she is, the vessel of a thousand secrets, nestled between his mind and hers. The home between two hearts.

_ And well, it’s J for Johnny. _

_ But it’s V for his Veneration. _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the first thing I've written for fun in a while so feedback is welcome!!!!

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first thing I've written for fun in a while so feedback is welcome!!!!


End file.
